Works by
Ed Dee
(Writer)
[February 3, 1940 - ]

• The Con Man's Daughter (2003)
  An ex-cop must solve his own daughter's kidnapping in this grittily authentic thriller. Ex NYPD detective Eddie Dunne must search his own past for clues when his 35-year old daughter Kate is kidnapped from her suburban New York home.
  
  While the cops wait for ransom demands and hunt down a stolen car seen leaving the driveway, Dunne is a step ahead. He's sure that the disappearance has to do with his previous employment as a general fixer for Anatoly Lukin, legendary Brighton Beach crime boss. And while Lukin was involved in non-violent activities like Medicare fraud and gas gouging, his chief rival, Yuri Burodenko, engineered sales of Russian military weapons and was capable of extreme violence.
  
  The search turns more desperate when Dunne's former partner's head lands on his front yard. Now Dunne will do anything to find Burodenko, but there's another gangster with a score to settle with Eddie....

• Nightbird (1999)
  A young actress plummets through the sky, slamming down onto the roof of a parked car. Detectives Anthony Ryan and Joe Gregory believe the Broadway star's "suicide" may actually be something more sinister. The main suspect is a big-time Broadway producer with a shady past. But who is the mysterious figure known only as the "Juggler" — and what connections does he have to the dead girl?
  
  From the back alleys of Broadway to vanishing Irish communities of Yonkers, Ryan and Gregory work through family secrets and tarnished reputations to find out what really happened on that balcony. As they discover the truth, the case becomes personal for Ryan, bringing him dangerously close to losing everything, in the suspenseful novel Nightbird.

• Little Boy Blue (1997)
  At the center of Little Boy Blue is an airport heist gone bad. A young baggage handler has been gunned down. Detective Joe Gregory and his partner, Anthony Ryan, sense something "hinky" about the killing of young Johnny Boy Counihan, who wore an old blue NYPD overcoat to his death. Determined to find the killer, the two cops cast their lot with Johnny Boy's angry, heartbroken, street-smart grandfather, Vito Martucci, who claims to know who did the killing and why.
  
  Vito doesn't have all the answers. While the detectives interview suspects, a hoods' hangout in Queens is firebombed and another body is found in a car trunk at the airport, this one covered with artificial eyes. And a group of young Irish immigrants, linked to Johnny Boy's life and death, tell Ryan and Gregory a story that ranges from charmingly curious to darkly disturbing.
  
  The real killers — and the real motive — remain hidden somewhere in the city that pays Ryan's and Gregory's salary and confounds them, the city of their fathers, their sins, their enemies. For the Great Gregory, years of hard living have taken a steep emotional toll. For Ryan, being a cop first and a husband second is giving way to a new sense of love for his wife and a marriage that has endured. And for both, a partnership forged in the mad, unceasing poetry of the street — as well as the politics of the force — is turning to something else: a deeper understanding and acceptance of each other's flawed humanity.
  
  When Gregory and Ryan finally uncover the truth behind Johnny Boy's killing, it is a truth laced with bitter irony, love, and innocence betrayed. Like the character of Vito Martucci, a man of pride, resourcefulness, and enormous heart, like the cop bars the partners visit, like the vista of Manhattan from the Triboro Bridge, like an unforgettable Christmas party in Ryan's house, Little Boy Blue is a novel that feels for its people, its place, and its time. For here are real bonds being forged between real men and women, between lovers and families — and between partners doing a job that's in their blood.

• Bronx Angel (1995)
  While New York City digs out from a freak April snowstorm a young officer is found dead in the Bronx, his pants pulled down around his knees, his throat slashed. Nearby a crowd has gathered. Not to witness the murder scene, but to see an apparition of the Virgin Mary on an icy wall.
  
  Anthony Ryan and his partner, the gladhanding, flawed, and brilliant Joe Gregory, are working out of police headquarters. In the frigid, miraculous Bronx the death of a policeman will bring heavy heat from the brass, who want the case closed quickly and quietly, and from street-level cops, who want revenge. But Ryan and Gregory have both survived too much alcohol, too much violence, and too much departmental politics to lose their cool.
  
  Retracing the last hours of the dead cop's life, Ryan and Gregory move through a world of streetwalkers on their "strolls" and transvestites who gather at steamy after-hours clubs. Yet every turn they take brings the two men back to the NYPD: to a tough-talking cop and his hard, blonde girlfriend.
  
  Doing a job that gets in the way of a life, Ryan decides to shake loose a nest of crooks with badges, even as his wife packs his suitcase for a trip to Delaware, where their daughter is getting married for the third time. Back in New York, he and Gregory will have to face the men they've nailed, the pain they've caused, and the one piece of the puzzle that still hasn't been found.
  
  Bronx Angel is a riveting murder story and a gritty, authentic portrait of a "cop's knowledge" — the knowledge that tells you how to decipher a murder scene, how to beat a traffic jam, and what lies to tell your commanding officer or wife.
  
  From late-night talk in cop bars to the haunting sounds that come over a car radio, from the spectacle of a battered homeless man who lives to fight policemen to the fresh-faced young recruits in sweatshirts and jeans, Bronx Angel weaves together an unforgettable portrait of men and women on the job — and the dangerous games that sometimes make them heroes, sometimes make them dirty, and sometimes get them killed.

• 14 Peck Slip (1994) -- 1994 New York Times Notable Book of The Year
  Not since the debut of Joseph Wambaugh has a first novel packed the gut-wrenching punch of Ed Dee's electrifying 14 Peck Slip. And not since Robert Daley and William Caunitz has anyone captured the pathos, violence, and dark humor of being a cop in New York City. Whether it is the complex interplay between two longtime partners, the conversation in a police bar at closing time, or a midnight call to look down at the body of a dead informant, Ed Dee captures a world of law and disorder with an insider's relentless vision.
  
  In the darkness of a December morning in lower Manhattan's Fulton Fish Market a mob rip-off is under way: thousands of pounds of fish are calmly "tapped" — stolen — from wholesalers on the street. It's the price of doing business.
  
  But detectives Joe Gregory and Anthony Ryan have not come to Peck Slip to stop fish tapping. They've come to watch a fifty-gallon drum being dumped into the East River by a mobster in a Mets hat.
  
  Convinced they're seeing a burial, Gregory and Ryan call in police divers and get a surprise. The dive brings up a barrel, but it's not theirs. Instead, this one is old and rusty, and inside is the body of a man in blue — a cop named Jinx Mulgrew, who disappeared ten years ago.
  
  Like a shark, the Great Gregory plunges his teeth into the ten-year-old death, hoping that it will finally put his career over the top. Ryan, who reads Cheever and contemplates early retirement, approaches the murder in his own methodical way, knowing that it will mean more time away from his wife and their red-shingled house in Yonkers. For both men the case leads behind the blue wall of silence into a mystery of adultery and corruption. And as they move from mob social clubs to retired police veterans, from Mulgrew's high-strung, sophisticated widow to a sultry Puerto Rican bar maid who was once Mulgrew's lover, the two cops must confront their relationships with their job, their family, and each other.
  
  Violent, funny, and moving, 14 Peck Slip is full of details that only a police veteran could capture, such as the beginning of a long night in a stakeout car: "We were like an old couple preparing for a night of TV. We had our favorite chairs and a snack." Or getting ready for a raid: "'AR 15,' he said. 'Light as a feather.' 'Looks like a toy,' I said, waving off the gun. 'They're all toys, Ryan. This ain't no job for a grown man.'" Or the Great Gregory, after being hospitalized after an ambush outside the mob hangout: "'I love this freaking job, Pally.'"
  
  14 Peck Slip is as authentic — and entertaining — as it gets.

See also:

• Cop Tales 2000 (2000), Liz Martinex DeFranco, Marilyn Olsen, and Kieth Bettinger, eds.
  See "The Tailman" by Ed Dee